Tag Archives: email

Everyone gets email when they sign up for high speed internet service … the problem is that you’re tied to that internet service for that email address. If you switch service providers, you could lose the address. Even worse, if your provider goes out of business, you could loose access entirely. Sometimes the email provider charges a fee for better service and/or removing advertising.

Yes, you could use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL, but you’re still tired to the provider. Plus, you don’t often get to choose the best address (johnsmith5734563@xyz.com just isn’t that sexy).

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get an email address that belongs to you forever?

As a result of this, many unsuspecting domain owners are being ‘blamed’ for spam that appears to come from their domain.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy way to protect your domain from this: Publish DMARC policies.

If you are publishing SPF records and signing your email with DKIM, you can publish DMARC policies that tell receiving mail servers what do with emails that don’t align with the SPF and DKIM information.

SPF policies are DNS records that indicate what mail servers your mail is sent from.

DKIM is a way to add digital signatures to your email so that receiving mail servers can verify it was sent from an authorized source and that it wasn’t modified in transit.

Nothing has changed on my system and yet they haven’t accepted a message to deliver to one of their users in 3 days (maybe more). And, of course, there’s no way to actually contact a human to find out what is going wrong.

I’m on Yahoo’s email feedback loop … so I’m notified when someone complains about a message. Nothing has come in recently from the feedback loop.

I used to be on their bulk sender white-list. There was never a mention of having to renew the white-list approval.

A note to all my friends … DO NOT USE YAHOO FOR EMAIL!Especially for business email. The folks at Yahoo do NOT know how to provide service.

Gmail doesn’t have this problem … nor does Hotmail (much as I love to hate Microsoft).

Oh, and FWIW, yahoo customer service tends to ignore questions that are too complex for their script reading drones to answer.

I’ve always suspected this about the legal disclaimers that are becoming ubiquitous at the bottom (and sometimes top) of email messages from companies that employ attorneys …

… they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.

By now everyone’s probably heard about the data breach at Epsilon … which resulted in a lot of major eCommerce vendors customers mailing list getting stolen.

Personally, I’ve gotten notifications from Chase, Walgreen, Tivo, Best Buy, 1-800-Flowers, and a few others … informing me of the breach and assuring me that no critical information was stolen … just my email address.